


the witch and the holocron

by SecretReyloTrash (BadOldWest)



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe: Modern Setting, Angst, Cursed Ben, Curses, Everyone Roasts Kylo for Smoking, F/M, Familiars, Jealousy, Kiki’s Delivery Service Vibes, Kylo Can Turn Into Anything BUT Not Back Into a Man, Magic, Mentions of past abuse, Messing With Ancient Artifacts Has Consequences, Modern Witchcraft, Stupid-Worldbuilding, Wayfinders Do NOT Have Rights, Witch Rey, Witch!Rey, Witchcraft, shapeshifter ben, sith holocrons
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-04
Updated: 2020-02-08
Packaged: 2021-02-27 03:27:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 5,790
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22120273
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BadOldWest/pseuds/SecretReyloTrash
Summary: A dull croak expands his chest. She leans back in the doorframe with her nose wrinkling in distaste.A remarkable first impression.“I didn’t even hear you at first, but you reek of bad magic, little guy.”Rey is an inexperienced witch new to the neighborhood. Kylo is puzzling over a mysterious artifact left behind by his grandfather. Their paths cross when Kylo gets the wrong end of a quite nasty curse. Rey offers to break it for a price: but can she break his curse for him or must he do it alone?
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 75
Kudos: 226





	1. Chapter 1

He is the only person to see the new witch move into the neighborhood. And the first thought he has is that it is odd for him to ever have  _ news.  _

The second is that he lost his favorite alley to go have a smoke to an ugly yellow dollhouse. 

Kylo was stepping out of the alley after doing just that, and that was how he first saw her. This zone of the city did not have its own hedge-witch since the last disappeared in a puff of flames six years ago. There was talk of the opening left by her being filled like a troublesome pothole, half-seriously, as everyone in the neighborhood had come to accept the hole and adapt to it instead of demanding it be straightened out. It was not prime real estate for witches to live, in all honesty, save for the odd divining-witch come to elbow their way in for fortunes. 

However, fortunes had taken off for witches and mortals since the internet anyway, so real estate wasn’t a problem anymore in that field. Anyone could do it with a webcam. Witches who could (and many that couldn’t) were starting to stick together instead of striking out on their own.

But a hedgewitch was a solitary life because there could only be one per a certain number of miles. A hedgewitch, at least any decent one, sold remedies in person because they were there to solve physical problems. Ailments, aches, etc. It was hard to find a place as one in practice, without overlapping in the jurisdiction of another; so things were either competitive or empty with little in-between while a place sought to find its witch and a witch sought to find her place. 

She is not immediately, apparently,  _ that witch. _ She looks normal enough, without the accessories in her arms. Her hair is cropped just above her shoulders and tied sloppily half-up. She wears large boots with thick soles and short shorts and a t-shirt. That makes her look like a normal, if pretty to a degree worthy of note, girl. She is only carrying a mustard-yellow dollhouse in her arms, just a tiny eyesore for the time being, and kind of a weird thing for a woman of her age to be touting around. She looks like a little girl lost without a family with this small wooden home in her arms. In her free hand, twisted out at the wrist to extend out of her hold on the dollhouse, there is something that looked like a compass. 

The compass is frantically whirring in her hands as she passes him. He can hear it like wingbeats, or birdsong.

She stops dead at the edge of the alley, too close to him for his liking, closely regarding the compass. 

She does not look like a witch. Especially how she smiles at him in passing as though nervous about what she is going to do, and his ignorance of witches always makes him assume insanity over magic when he encounters any weirdness. 

So he grunts a little in annoyance when she sets the yellow dollhouse down on the pavement of the alley he had just vacated. The witch ignores him, takes a deep breath, and with a few garbled words the dollhouse expands to fill every crevice between the two buildings: a large mustard-colored eyesore crammed between a Chinese place and a liquor store. It is a narrow, odd, folding building that has to grow mostly  _ up _ instead of out, sprouted from a dollhouse and a few strange words and filling a space once occupied by restaurant dumpsters and the occasional habitual smoker but respectful non-smoking tenant, Kylo Ren.

She really took his entire alley away from him.

The witch straightens her chin and looks at the transformed house with a blend of confidence and nerves he can’t help but respect a little, in the midst of his cloud of irritation over needing to find a new place to bum a cigarette. 

_ “I can do this,” _ she says quietly. A little smile forms on her lips. He wants to say something about the sulfur-smell of lingering magic that’s polluting up the street, but he’s got the reek of a smoker clinging to his clothes and fingers anyway.

“There goes the neighborhood,” he mutters instead, shoving his hands in his pockets.

She looks a little lost without the dollhouse in her arms: if out-of-place with it there at least compete in her oddness. 

“Excuse me?”

She blinks at him, a blush rising on her high cheekbones.

He doesn’t feel one way or another about witches. He’s never needed one. He’s never liked one. But he doesn’t like change in general, and there she stands, and he’s down the one place he takes the occasional five minutes to relax and breathe in.

“I thought witches were not supposed to interfere with their environments,” he kicked the brick wall next to her yellow house, “there. The alley.”

This is true, technically, though she had slotted into a space in the world where she wouldn’t bother  _ anyone else _ but him.

She blinks at him. 

“I didn’t think...anyone would mind,” she stares at the place the house takes up as though she’s on a completely different planet. There’s a childishness there; flickering with fear over what she could have done wrong. Her hand lifts the compass to her face to check whatever was there that told her to stop here. From the slump of her shoulders, the journey was long. “There was just some dumpsters and an AC unit. And it’s far enough away from the closest hedgewitch. I checked. I’ve been walking the boundaries all day.” 

“I like to go there…” his complaints sound even lamer on his lips when she doesn’t get angry, just plainly sad. “...for a smoke.”

Her eyes shoot to his face. They were cloudy with doubtful thoughts only a second ago. Now she’s zeroed in on him.

“Bleh,” she says, throwing her shoulders back defiantly. Her nose scrunches like  _ he’s _ the bad smell. “Cigarettes.”

He stares at her quizzically. She glares at him. 

“I’m allowed to take up residence here. I’m not crossing bounds.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

_ “I’m allowed to be here,” _ it rises like an assertion she’s had to make a few hundred times, a determined flush colors her freckled cheeks, and her eyes narrow further at whatever expression is on his face.  _ “What?” _

He just stares down at her upturned wrath. He wants to light upon it, like she’d holding open palms full of birdseed, nibble from her irritation as though it’s offered as feed.

“Don’t you witches usually have a friend?”

Her look tells him that she knows what he means: but he better not dare ask her what he means. 

She sets down her little copper compass in the metal trash lid near her hip. He wonders, softly, for a moment if she knows it’s in the exact spot he rested his pack of cigarettes as he fumbled for a match moments ago.

“You know,” he digs his heels in, “A little cat or something. Or a frog.”

He keeps talking, despite the absolute murderous look she’s giving him. Maybe she stole that compass. Maybe she’s not a real witch.

Even he knew it. A witch without a familiar was like a body without a heart. 

“What? Nothing wrong with a frog.”

She twists away from him, arms crossed over her chest even though she has nothing to carry. She slams the door on the yellow house, which was new to this street, and yet when he looks at it now he can’t picture where the alley went in that spot. As if it had always been that way.

Magic always freaked him out. He liked keeping to his own: the zoning laws at least controlled the quantity of witches in a given area. 

He glances to his side, the light catching a flash of copper by his hand. 

She left her compass.

He almost goes to her door. But after offending her, the liberty feels too much like he’s prowling after her to gloatingly watch her tend her bruises. He’s not so ignorant of other people that he can’t tell the subject made her a  _ touch _ prickly.

Instead, more curious than he likes to be, he pockets the witchy navigational tool.

And that’s the last he will see of the witch in the alley for the time being.


	2. Chapter 2

“Maybe you should have her take a look at your Grandfather’s Holocron.”

Kylo rolls his eyes as he scrubs the plate in the sink. His mother is dying to get that thing out of his hands, he can already tell she’s praying a witch will inform him that it was worthless would finally make him give up on the artifact. 

“Grandad’s Holocron doesn’t need to be poked around at by a stranger.”

_ “A more qualified stranger than you.” _

There is a lame, temper-heavy response that rises on his tongue that he could do as he pleased with the strange, un-openable box his grandfather had willed him: but instead Kylo went for tact. His mother requires tact. Especially today, the day after her birthday, where she called him to report to him how her birthday went because he forgot her birthday and certainly  _ did not call.  _ But her suggestion wasn’t out of that specific malice just because he was in hot water. 

She was always choosing others as the more reasonable option, even strangers, and this witch doesn’t need Leia believing in her credibility when Leia hadn’t even seen her.

Because everything about this witch is  _ odd. _

And it is easier to make light of her oddness than the fact that his mother’s faith in the general population over him was salt in a wound that never stopped being fresh.

He adjusts his cell, and his tone, to allow himself more control of the conversation.

“I wouldn’t trust  _ her,” _ he hints with a tone of secrecy, and that is all Leia needs.

“Why? What’s wrong with her?”

He tries not to grin to himself. He so rarely indulged in gossip his mother could never resist a conspiratorial tone. He realizes maybe sometimes, having news is a good thing, so maybe he should start paying more attention to take some of the heat off of himself. 

_ “She doesn’t have a familiar.” _

That is another observation that he was first privy to. He had assumed maybe the thing was in the dollhouse when she first moved in, but a witch can’t go far without her familiar and this one was always alone. Maybe that’s why he hadn’t figured her to be one immediately, just a little crazy, when he met her. Even _he_ knew a witch without a familiar was like a bike without wheels. 

Leia doesn’t even need gossip to reroute this conversation.

“Hmm,” he can practically see her lips thinning as she takes a sip of wine, “you’re right not to go to her, then, perhaps she’s a sort of off-brand witch, or a con artist, and you don’t want that.”

_ “Exactly,” _ he goes back to his washing, feeling he worked his own magic to have talked his mother out of her own meddling while making it seem like her idea.

“Your voice is sounding worse.”

He tries to make no excess of sound in response: his answer was mechanical and smooth. “I’m fine.”

“You’re killing yourself.”

“It's just a rough throat. Grandad has a rasp,” He shakes his head, going back to his dishes, “it was cool.”

“Smoker’s lungs. The machines they put him on to keep him alive…”  Leia is clearly trying to shoo off the memory,  “You should quit.”

“Hmm,” he pretends to consider. _ “maybe.” _

* * *

He always goes back to the Holocron. 

The ancient box is lined with little seams and rivets, like a puzzle, but no matter how he grasps it and tries to manipulate the sides to unlock, it is unmoved. 

He has been trying for years but they just won’t budge. 

It’s his nightly habit to tinker with it, since he became old enough for it to be in his position, no matter how hard his mother tried to prevent that. It’s soothing. The not-quite-stone, not-quite-metal surface of the volcanic black. His fingertips searching for indentations that would act as a key. His eyes combing through texts that might have the words to unlock it. 

He thinks of the witch, and her potential help. It’s sour and burning in his mind now that his mother has suggested it. But maybe, just maybe…

He has tried everything until he extracts the witch’s tool from the pocket of his jeans. the witch might be a little kooky but it was worth a try. He'd tried everything else.  He still almost thinks he’s crazy for trying it, but as soon as his hand lights upon the metal, he can feel it whirring. It’s awake. 

The Holocron sitting on his desk in his darkened living room seems to call to him. 

He’s read countless books on these old artifacts. So many times he has been convinced he has found himself in possession of the paragraph that will have it finally working. But everything he tried had been in vain. 

He holds up the strange compass above the box. There’s a pull to one corner. He follows it with his hand, navigating the terrain of all the valleys in the surface.

Strange how he’d never credit the witches for anything until now, when he holds his breath and trembles because it might finally work.

There’s a section that presses inward at one corner. Then the one across from it. But the other two corners never pressed in: he’s known this for years. Testing both at a time, then alternating one after another, then switching the order, or making a series of taps into them like morse code. 

He spent a summer learning morse code to try every configuration of activating spell he could manage.

But the compass leads his wandering fingers to the center point between the two corners that did not have togs that could be pushed in. Right at the edge. He presses at the center, forming a triangle from the two corner keys he had worked down. He’d never noticed that indentation in relation to the fruitless searching of pressure points. 

With a little pressure, and the two flat corners of the box completely fall away, rending the Holocron in two pieces, and the box turns into a pyramid. Blinking, he rests the shelled husk of the half-cube aside: the pyramid revealed is much more interesting. It glows with red light. His large fingers search for where he set down the witch’s compass without breaking his eyes from the swirling surface of the Holocron. 

The compass moves his hand for him. But it’s whirring again. Pulsing, like the heartbeat of a frightened mouse. It shows him the way to work open the puzzle: but he can also feel down to the molecules the metal resists this task. It cowers in such an impossible way for an object. It’s like a knife melting against the surface of butter. 

It's her magic that he's using. For some reason it resists him. 

_ Command it. Summon her magic. _

He tightens his wrist to straighten out the feverish buzz of the compass. The arrow starts spinning in rapid circles when he lowers it to the glowing surface of the pyramid.

“Show me what it can do,” he commands, summoning his courage. It has taken years to solve this puzzle, and with a little magic _-maybe his mother was_ a little _right-_ it was right at his fingertips.

He takes a deep breath as the timid copper gadget goes completely still. He thinks of the witch he borrowed it from. Stole. For a strange moment the compass itself reminds him of her. 

And there is a dark puff of smoke, sending him flying backwards, like a bomb goes off in his dimly lit apartment. 


	3. Chapter 3

He’s somewhere on the floor when he hears a knock at the door. The sulfuric smell of old magic drifts in a black dust that has still not settled.

_ “Sir? Excuse me?” _

The knocking gets more fervent.

“It would be best if you let me inside, I know it’s a rude demand to make of you, Sir, but there seems to be something going terribly wrong in there.”

He doesn’t move. He’s not sure why, but he knows he’s incapable of opening the door in the state he’s in. He’s unaware exactly of what state he’s in: but it’s not a good one.

He is...changed. He can feel it even if her doesn't _know_ it. Something has happened.

The compass whirs slower and slower beside him. The knocking continues. Getting faster and more insistent.

There is something quite neighborly about a concerned knock on the door. He can’t recall the last time he had someone there to check on him.

“Is anyone in there?”

The floor feels kind of nice. It’s probably best to just lie there, in the dark. He’ll get up some other time.

_“I am giving my warning,”_ the voice calls out from the hallway: all business. He notices it immediately through her tone. She’s declaring her rights as a witch. 

There’s a small grunt of mild pain, she must be drawing blood to prove her honesty:

“I offer my services. I am the first to respond at this place. There is no doctor, no priest, and no law here presently to assist. That leaves a witch. By my bond I am here to help, not interfere.”

He’s surprised his disturbance called for a bond. Bonds were a hassle for witches. Lots of paperwork. He’d seen the finer details of one being nailed out after a healing witch stepped in during a near-choking of a woman in a coffee shop: the hacked-up croissant had already dissolved on the floor by the time they were conducting witness interviews that the witch hadn’t in fact used her powers on another to have stolen someone’s memories or turned their feet purple.

Magic was messy and few people trusted it.

There’s a puff of magic that flushes through the keyhole from the other side like a sneeze. With a click, the door swings open without a key.

A scrying crystal dangles from a chain in her hand. It swings, flickering back and forth in the ray of light from his apartment building’s hallway.

She takes a small step into his dark apartment. Even as sick as he feels, from his place looking up at her on the floor, he feels embarrassed for the state of things. This room hasn’t seen another person but him in many years. She’s not exactly this image of aesthetic perfection: but everything looks much messier and sadder when she stands beside it. 

She didn’t have to come in tonight: he could have straightened up if he had known the Holocron was going to explode and the witch would be there to make sure no one died.

But she’s not looking around his shabby apartment. She sniffs a few times with her first few, tentative steps, and covers her nose, which feels a little dramatic.

“This is bad magic,” she whispers to herself. Her hand is white around the chain the crystal dangles from. She looks like she can’t breathe. _ “Very bad.” _

The witch wanders around the patch of light let in from the hallway. But she doesn’t go deeper. Seems too nervous to stray into the dark room.

“Whatever happened in here…” she peers down each side of his hallway, “Hello?  _ Is anyone in here?” _

For the first time he realizes he  _ can’t _ answer even if he wanted to. Something is very wrong here.

She places her hand on the door. Blood drips down the wood from her bond-opened palm. Her body slumps in a sad way, like when he disparaged her new home when she took his alley from him. Funny how the bitterness lingered over that encounter, but now it was turned entirely on himself.

“I touched nothing, saw nothing, and left immediately because there was no one here to help, " s he whispers in a rush.

If anything she seems eager to leave: the dark forces at work not yet proven and perhaps she wants to hide her eyes before they are. 

But that’s not entirely true.

Because she wasn’t alone. And she didn’t help.

He's still here, in very bad form, staring up at the ceiling from a very small spot on the floor.

* * *

Something happens once she’s gone. Something about how things didn’t feel quite right seems to wrench him through the night. While she is only in the yellow house where the alley once was across the street, he knows he could not currently make it there on foot, and yet he feels torn through space and time to arrive on that doorstep in not-human steps. Like he has to follow her, even when he could never keep up.

She’s eating a square of chocolate when she answers the door. He's not even sure how he knew to answer it: just that magic calls in his chest and his heart whirrs like that copper compass until she stands before him. 

Then it calms. 

There’s a bloody bandage on her hand where she must have cut it to make her bond earlier. Her head swivels to one side, then the other, laterally as she checks the street for whatever made the muted thud against her door.

He’s on the mat, but it takes her a moment to spot him.

“Oh,” she freezes, her eyebrows raised, “hello there.”

A dull croak expands his chest. She leans back in the doorframe with her nose wrinkling in distaste. 

A remarkable first impression. 

“I didn’t even hear you at first, but you  _ reek _ of bad magic, little guy.”

She continues to eat in a way that makes it clear it’s not intentional rudeness, just ignorant of the knowledge that it is rude to chew with her mouth full and not share.

Or not even consider it: because with piercing clarity Kylo realizes he’s a frog.

This is a terrible night. 

“You must be someone’s familiar,” she’s not even going to invite him in, speaking casually as though offering directions to a stranger on the street for a place she’s never been before “I’m so sorry. Did you lose your witch?”

Even though she’s solid and right in front of him, her image flickers with this odd energy. Pain, he realizes, but can only croak in response. 

“I’m so sorry,” she repeats, lowering the square of chocolate poised by her lips, “I, uh, I know all about that. Here.”

And this he doesn’t expect. She, despite her apparent perpetually sunny disposition, had a certain reserve. Like the smile was a defense, not an invitation. She crouches and holds her hand open on the ground in front of him. 

He had gone to her for help, but he’s surprised by the automatic response to fill her palm when she offers it. He takes a single leap into her waiting hand.

_ “Bleh,” _ she mutters to herself, wrinkling her nose,  _ “cigarettes.” _

She shivers, her fingers flexing out in a tense stretch, over the feel of his amphibious skin. But she carries him gently inside despite her disgust, and brings him into the house that was once a dollhouse, himself cradled like the toy was cradled to her chest as she walks with somehow both curiosity and purpose. 

  
  


* * *

“I don’t envy you, that is a hell of a curse.”

She pours herself a mug of tea. He rests on her kitchen counter, probably so they can speak eye-to-eye, but she didn’t have to put him on a saucer like he was dirty. That felt slightly rude. 

“Would you like some?” she offers, and he has no answer than a nervous glance towards the sink: frogs aren’t fond of hot water. 

He hates that he knows this now. But he’ll have to get used to it.

She smacks a palm into her forehead.

“Of course, sorry.”

She carefully lifts him in the saucer and runs the tap over his now-less-than-slimy skin. He gives a little shake under the cool stream, and burrows in relief in the filled saucer when she sets him back down. He could be a frog for a while more if she remembered to do that, and kept washing him, and maybe lifted the spell she’d cast that zapped the flies from her house straight into the apartment of the woman who was rude to her when she worked in a grocery store as a teenager.

The witch snickers. 

“That was an old one. There’s rules about malicious intent, but when I tried to report that one to The Code it wasn’t  _ technically _ a violation.”

She reported herself for malicious intent? Also, how did he suddenly even know that her magic had even done that?

“The Knight evaluating me had a certain sense of humor,” she smirks towards her teacup, not meeting his buggy frog-eyes as though embarrassed. “He laughed me out of the office and insisted he would start using that one.”

He ribbits. 

The witch seems to snap out of it.

“Oh, sorry.” 

She sets down her tea and crouches in front of the counter. Her hand hovers over his back.

“May I?”

He croaks again, a chirp more than a groan, like the sound from the bushes on a summer night. 

She gently touches him, and he feels a warm buzz as she skates her fingertips along his skin. 

“Interesting…this isn’t your true form.”

She purses her lips. 

“Well, I’m sorry I thought you were a familiar. I’m not used to seeing animals with an aura like yours that aren’t linked to a witch, but I guess it was just this nasty curse you’ve got there.”

She has this odd professional tone, like an auto-mechanic winding up to a hefty price to save the engine for you without even lifting her head out from under the hood.

“I can fix it,” she nods, convincing no one in the room but herself, which seems to be the only person she even needs to convince. She lets out a temper-evening breath: “I can do this.”

The witch takes another deep breath and picks him up in her hands, clasping him inside. His long legs attempt to leap free, but she holds steady between her palms without crushing him, and he can hear her odd murmuring, and there’s a melting sensation to all of his thoughts dripping out of his head and then everything goes black.


	4. Chapter 4

Her kitchen felt big from a frog’s-eye view: but it’s not. 

Once he gets his bearings, it is the smallest kitchen he has ever seen. Pots and pans hang from the ceiling because there is nowhere else for them to go. The oven door unhinged would almost touch the cabinet across from it, with no room for her to stand between them if she was to say, opening the door to check on the food inside. 

Kylo can tell from where he rests on the counter in the remnants of her magic. He  _ is _ bigger. 

But not big enough.

“I...uh... _ sorry.” _

_ Why? _

“So,” she appears in front of him, not as large as before. Her half-up hair is fuzzing at the ends, curling, as if the high levels of stress in the room curdled her slightly. She looks flushed and very guilty, freckles popping against her cheeks. “I’m very new at this. And a bit rubbish. I did my best.”

She strokes his fingers through his fur. “This was the best I could do. I’m really, really sorry.”

_ The best you could do? And what is that, exactly? _

She grimaces, her nose wrinkling guiltily. 

“On the bright side, you look really cute?”

She holds up a hand mirror.

There’s a rabbit in the reflection. A black rabbit.

Aesthetically suiting but definitely not what he was looking for.

_ This isn’t fixed. _

She shrugs.

“I don’t know why it didn’t work. The spell I used, you should be able to change back.”

_ Okay, lovely, so then why am I not-- _

The Witch lets out a howl and stumbled back a few paces. 

“Wait,” her chest is heaving slightly, as if something just occurred to her “why can I hear you?”

_ Am I not talking?  _

She shakes her head, that embarrassed flush gone and replaced with a pale pallor. 

“You’re not talking. I did not turn you into a talking rabbit.”

_ Then how do you know what I’m saying? _

“I don’t know!”

She paces around the tiny kitchen so fast she seems to forget the size of it and crashes her knees into a cabinet with a frantic shriek. She covers her eyes with her hands.

_ “Why _ are you in my head?”

_ I don’t know, I just didn’t want to be a frog anymore so you turned me into a rabbit. _

“Try changing back. I don’t know. I lifted the spell. You should be able to--”

He wills it, readily, he wills it just to get out of here, and he does feel a vast change coming from inside him. The entire perspective of the rooms shifts once more, and when it stops, he knows he is not what he once was. 

For as many times as in many minutes. 

The witch covers her mouth with both hands. 

_ “Oh, I hate spiders,” _ she whispers as she stares frozen at him with her nose wrinkled. He’s a little dizzy in his place in the middle of the swirl of sulfur smell. 

_ Try being one. _

“Sorry,” she blurts out and edges closer even though she’s not good at hiding how uncomfortable she is with all the legs. “I’m going about this badly. I’m Rey.”

He’s starting to pick up that the brightness in her tone is a way of hiding a lot of her fear. 

_ Kylo. _

“You make a very handsome spider, Kylo.”

_ The damage is done, Rey. _

“Whew,” she places her hands on her hips, “this is going to take some getting used to. Can you hear my thoughts?”

_ I'm not sure. You tend to just speak them all out loud anyway. _

She picks her cup of tea back up.

“Interesting.”

But he can hear it, faintly, even when she's taking a sip instead of saying it:

_ Asshole. _

And it's not much, but it's _almost_ like being back to his old self.  
  



	5. Chapter 5

_ How can you fix this? _

Rey is still staring apprehensively at his new legs. 

_ I need you to fix this. _

“Well,” she looks a little embarrassed, “I’m not saying this is what went wrong, but I’m actually...missing...something important. That helps with my magic.”

_ Fuck. _

“I can do it on my own!” 

Her tone is defensive as she straightens up to argue, the straightest she has stood since he turned into the spider.

“It just helps.”

This discomfort of not having his body is starting to dive into something murkier than strangeness: he wants his body back and everything feels wrong and terrifying now. He’s got six extra legs to think about. Too many eyes. He wants a hand to cover his face, two human feet to walk him right out of this witch’s house. 

_ I want to change back. _

“It’s not that easy: you’re cursed,” she purses her lip sympathetically. "We can't just change you. We have to figure how to break it."

In his panic, he can feel the power surging around him. The perspective of the room keeps frantically shifting: big to small, small to big, his body changing in rapid succession when it keeps failing to give him what he wants.

“Kylo,” Rey says gently, like she’s warning someone who may not listen, and he feels something like a balloon pop inside him. 

She reaches for him and weaves him around her hand. She shouldn’t be able to do that. Like his a length of rope, or a--

She passes him over the hand mirror.

\--a snake. A black snake. Like the black spider. 

“I think you burned out your magic a little. At least the magic of the curse. So why don’t you rest for a little while. I’ll find you a little box or something...”

Her hands are warm. He coils his muscles around them. His head snuggles defeatedly in her palm.

_ What did you lose? _

Rey startles as she moves through the house with him wrapped around her hand. 

“What?”

_ That affects your magic? _

“I...well…” 

Rey sounds faraway, and reluctant to explain. He hears her free hand emptying a shoebox. Nearly-upside down, he faintly registers that she’s carried him to her bedroom. It’s the first time he’s been in a girl’s room in a long time. It’s not as witchy as he had first anticipated.

“It’s always harder without a familiar. There’s a tool I use to help me, but it’s gone missing since I moved in…”

As if for emphasis, her foot kicks into a box on the floor.

_ Shit, _ he realizes. 

Her compass is still in his apartment. Does he tell her that he stole it?

He opts not to. Not tonight. Too much explaining, and he's deliriously tired.

“Sorry,” she holds him closer to her body as she stumbles through the living room, interpreting his panic for fear of being held by someone much bigger who was close to falling.

_ Where did your familiar go? _

“Oh,” Rey’s voice is high and breathy in an attempt to be casual, “I’ve almost  _ never _ had a familiar. I learned all my magic without one. It just takes a little  _ more.” _

That’s not really an answer. As for  _ more _ what, it’s unclear.

But he understands, in a way, like how he is capable of morphing into another animal in theory: but in practice the magic has snapped like a fully-extended leash, and he the dog yanked back by the throat.

Or not the dog, currently a snake, though he very well could be one after he rested.

What he likes the least in all of this is when Rey puts him in a box. To her credit, she did pad it the best she could with blankets. He can feel that restricted band of curse-magic try to flex: a lizard, a fox, anything that can clamber out and find somewhere soft to curl up for the night. 

"You can stay here until we figure this out," she promises softly before she turns out the light. Knowing she's going to be too is somewhat comforting. 

But he’s a snake in a cardboard box and that’s all he gets for the night. 


End file.
